The impressions lost chart illustrates how many additional impressions that matched your line items' targeting could have been purchased. Use this chart to understand what changes you can make to your line item’s settings in order to win more impressions in the auction.
- By default, this chart reflects the selected date range for all of the line items in your insertion order. However, if you want to view impression loss information for specific line items, select the checkboxes next to individual line items and the chart will update in real time.
- You can edit the date range by clicking the drop down to see up to 30 days of impression loss information.
- You can click the three dots icon
to download a CSV of the data.
- You can click Explore for suggestions to reduce impressions lost, and for more detailed impression loss information for each line item.
to download a CSV of the data.Reasons you're not winning more impressions
You may lose impressions for the following reasons:
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No eligible creative - Your selected line items don’t have any approved creatives. This can be due to:
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None of the assigned creatives meet the technical requirements for the line item - At least one assigned creative must match the required dimensions, video duration, etc.
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Third-party creatives are not allowed - If you're using third-party ad servers to serve creatives or pixels, your line item will only be able to purchase personalized ad inventory. For more information on this restriction, see non-personalized ad inventory.
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The user has not agreed to share their data with one of the creative's third-party domains - This may be related to inventory not allowing all of the ad technology providers in your creative.
- The creative could not be served due to local policies - This may be related to the creative being for restricted products or services, being unapproved to serve in Russia or China, and/or the creative including calls to an unidentified ad technology provider.
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Suggested actions: Assign creatives to your line item, or if you already have creatives assigned, address any open issues to make sure they’re serveable and compatible.
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Frequency limited - Your selected line items have hit their frequency caps and therefore can't purchase any additional impressions.
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Suggested actions: Consider broadening your targeting criteria to reach a wider audience, or increase your frequency cap to unblock additional spend.
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Below minimum bid - Your selected line items aren't bidding above the floor price for the inventory they target. One example of inventory with a floor price are direct deals.
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Suggested actions: Consider adopting automated bid strategies, which will adjust your bids dynamically in order to maximize performance and optimize toward your selected KPI.
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Budget or pacing - Your selected line items have exhausted their budget (either their flight budget or budget for the current pacing period). For YouTube & partners line items, this metric represents an estimate of the number of additional impressions that could have been purchased if your line item had a larger budget. For other line items, this metric counts the number of impressions not purchased due to being out of budget.
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Suggested actions: If a line item has exhausted its budget but you would like it to spend further, you will need to add additional budget.
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Auctions lost - The total number of impressions lost when competing against other line items within Display & Video 360 (in the "internal auction") and against other DSPs on the open exchange ("external auction").
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Suggested actions: If you’re using a fixed bid, consider adopting automated bid strategies. If you’re targeting a highly competitive audience or inventory segment, consider broadening your targeting.
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In most cases, losing a high number of impressions is a bad thing, and signifies that you're missing a lot of opportunities to deliver ads to the people you're trying to reach.
Limitations
- Data shown in the chart is based on the past 30 days..
- For YouTube & partners line items, "Loss to budget" data will reflect data from 2 days ago.
Frequently asked questions
How is impression loss calculated?Impression loss percentages are calculated using the following formulas.
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Frequency
Impressions not bid on because of your line item's frequency cap / All impressions that match your line item's targeting
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Budget or pacing
Impressions not bid on because your line item ran out of money (or is limited by your pacing settings) / All impressions that match your line item's targeting and frequency cap
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Auction lost
Impressions bid on but not won / All impressions that match your line item's targeting, frequency cap, and budget limitations
Although exchanges don't currently provide a reason you fail to win an impression, some possible explanations include:
- Your bid is too low.
- Your creative wasn't approved by the exchange.
- Or, any number of other reasons decided by the exchange.
Please keep these reasons in mind if you're losing a large percentage of impressions due to "bid," even though your line item's bid is quite high.
For example, say you have a line item that targets people in Shropshire in England. Over the past hour, 2 impressions from Shropshire were available, and you were able to purchase one of them, because you were outbid by another party on the other one. In this example, your line item would show a bid-based impression loss of 50% because you were outbid on 1 impression out of 2 possible impressions you would have wanted to purchase.
0% impression loss means that your line item has been able to purchase (i.e. has "won") every available impression that matches its targeting that was available.
100% impression loss means that your line item hasn't been able to purchase any impressions that were available, because of your line item's frequency cap, budget, and/or bid.
- Make sure you can preview your creatives in Display & Video 360.
- Confirm that your third-party tags are displaying content.
- Check if your creatives are targeted away from the inventory you're trying to buy.
- Make sure there aren't any missing or inactivated video assets in your VAST creative.
- Check to see if there are any other settings or setup issues that would cause your video tags to be unfetchable or unservable.
- If your creative is hosted in Campaign Manager 360, make sure there aren't any issues with transcoding the creative in Campaign Manager 360.
- If your creative is hosted by a publisher's third-party ad server, reach out to their exchange to ask why their tags might produce video errors.
